Music writer (SF Classical Voice, SF Chronicle, Opera). Blogs at irontongue.blogspot.com. Alto, martial artist. Former tech writer. Music, books, politics, food, public health. Cis, queer, Jewish. I instablock men who follow only women's accounts.
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The Poiesis web site hasn't been updated yet with this news. They might be taking naps. It's been an amazingly intense week. All of the quartets were so poised and played so well. Special props to the Cong, which dealt smoothly with the violist's BRIDGE breaking toward the end of a Schubert mvmt.
The Poiesis was fantastic. Will say that I also loved Kairi and Arete's Mozart!
Such a TELL.
This “explicit” is a weird editorial choice. The constitution gives the president no power over this at all. It’s not ambiguous.
🚨Children🚨Killed by🚨ICE Say their names. Their lives mattered and their deaths were govt. sanctioned murders. 1/2
New Mexico has issued a public health order that removes federal restrictions to COVID-19 vaccine access so that pharmacies in New Mexico can vaccinate people of all ages and risk profiles. Every state need to do this!
Thank you; I will.
It is pretty incomprehensible. Grotesque is a fair description.
F-D? He was a teenager when he was drafted...
@kbsalazar.bsky.social
@aikilizzy.bsky.social I am making a general point and trying to stay away from discussing specific authors in Ann Leckie's thread because I could run it off the rails. I have avoided mentioning the really problematic authors from the older generations for that reason.
(Okay, read Tolkien, Cordwainer Smith, and some others but....skip a bunch of the older generations.) 2/2
The SFF canon when I was growing up was largely made up of white guys with the occasional white woman, many of whom I would never suggest anyone read today except for historical purposes. Today...start with Le Guin, Delaney, Russ and read up to the present day. 1/
That is among the cutest things I have ever seen.
Abusers also control others using threats, some of which are primarily psychological and some of which are psychological and involve the threat of specific actions. "No one will love you" and "You'll never see your children again."
Yes.
Three federal courts have now ruled that the President does not have the authority to impose arbitrary tariffs. Trump tariffs are already starting to fuel inflation at a time when too many Americans are struggling to pay bills and put food on the table. (1/2)
Outraged by both his treatment of trans people and his treatment of homeless people.
Do they have lunch at a lower price point? We had an incredible lunch once for half or less of the dinner price, at a restaurant in Paris.
It's an absurd waste of money but I would rather they were spreading mulch than, well, they're out there with guns.
According to this announcement, the Oregon national guard will go on a year deployment to deal with the nonexistent emergency at the border. A friend tells me that one guardsman is a Medford cardiologist. There’s a one year wait to see a cardiologist there. www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article...
This.
Yep.
Hell yes.
Must add that via musical studies and choral singing I know a fair amount about Catholic ritual, and I've read the Gospels, though not recently. Even though I am Jewish I can tell Catholicism and mainstream Christianity from whatever the heck it is that Wagner dreamed up. 2/2
Oh hahaha YES. Aren't Napoleon, Wagner, and Lincoln the most-written-about figures, oh and Jesus Christ? 1/
I think I might have the Parzifal by Chretien de Troyes but not Wolfram von Eschenbach's and I feel a need to at least glance at both and maybe a scholarly discussion of the opera.
The music is so beautiful and the plot is SO WEIRD. I haven't seen it since 2018, but I have a review to write of an important historic release and, well, the SFO production is coming up in October, so i have the score and libretto and....I'm rolling my eyes a lot.
MADA: Makes Airways Dangerous Again www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/w...
Thanks! I will check them out. And I'm interested in additional recommendations! I assume that the ABQ is good in Brahms.
Oh yeah the Knights actually HAVE the Holy Grail in their possession and use it in the Act 1 ritual. 4/4
in Act 2 using bread (and blood? do I have this right?) from the Last Supper. Also note the King's father who has been near death for goodness knows how long. In the last SFO production he lived in a coffin. Is this weird enough? Do you want more details? :) 3/3
the spear that pierced Christ's side while he was on the cross, and that wound will not heal. The spear was wielded by the guy who castrated himself. The Knights are....spiritually decaying and can be rescued only by a "wise fool" (that's Parsifal). Also, note their enactment of communion 2/
The plot involves a made-up and utterly bizarre version of Christianity: the Knights of the Grail live on Montsalvat in Spain. Before the action of the opera 1) a guy who wanted to join them castrated himself to eliminate his desires 2) the King of the Knights was wounded by 1/
My uncontroversial opinion is that the head of the country's top public health agency should be a physician or a scientist or both not a former presidential speech writer and investor but here we are. Sadly I think this is the end of the CDC as we once knew it. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
We came to the UN to deliver the recommendations our government refuses to face, because people’s lives cannot wait. This refusal is one more step in this administration’s intent to undermine human rights and silence those who are fighting to protect them.
Remember the name Magnus Hirschfeld. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_...
With you all the way in preferring written information and human tour guides - I really dislike audio tours and don't use them. I saw the Bayeux in 1979 and it was awesome.
US government orders 46 states to destroy trans education materials https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/08/27/trans-education-us-state-directive/?utm_content=1756312804&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky
Parsifal: wow this opera is so weird.
Brahms string quartet favorite recordings: tell me who you like. This brought on by an astonishingly great performance of the B flat Major Quartet, Op. 67, at the Banff International String Quartet Competition by the Poiesis Quartet. I have the Emerson set and erm I don't like it much.
You're very welcome!
Oh oh oh
@kateelliottsff.bsky.social FInished "The Witch Roads." SO GOOD. Happily looking forward to "The Nameless Land."
There isn't a single sentence in this feature about the fact that Elizabeth Catlett studied at Howard, despite the fact that Howard was and remains pivotal in providing an environment for Black artists to find their voices and Catlett's work and politics were explicitly about Black experiences.
Yep.
Across Europe, supposed beacons of liberal democracy are increasingly conflating activism with criminality, setting a dangerous precedent.
I'm so proud of the work @mike-eagle.bsky.social and I are doing at @pastduepodcast.com: Interviews with actors, musicians, writers, YouTubers about the truth of making a living as a creative class. But it's relevant to all of us. The creative economy is the leading edge of all labor trends. /1
He is doing his best to get rid of women, Black people, and Black women throughout the federal government.
Our slide into authoritarian rule would not be possible without Trump's willing accomplices. William Pulte's corruption of the bureaucracy to single out the mortgages of Trump foes like Lisa Cook for "investigation" is the perfect example of this. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1996...
Trump's allegations against Lisa Cook are not the story. The story is that a Trump loyalist is deeply corrupting agency processes for the express purpose of manufacturing pretexts for referring Trump's leading enemies for DOJ prosecution. Dug into this process here: newrepublic.com/article/1996...
Thread about the governmental and individual corruption in the current administration and how government functions are being used against Trump's opponents. This is how a government becomes authoritarian and fascist.
It is vile in so many ways, including possibly being evidence of his mental decline.
Duck.
@sfopera.bsky.social Finally I have a post up about Bohème Out of the Box. irontongue.blogspot.com/2025/08/bohe...
The big story siouxcityjournal.com/news/local/g...
I saw a Marxist friend in April and he was just fine with the federal government being destroyed. I'm with you on stupid and nihilistic. The destruction of democracy doesn't mean that the perfect Communist state will be welcomed into existence.
"The City & The City" is great. "Railsea" is absolutely wild and so is "Kraken." I have another book of his hanging around that I haven't read yet.
Alex Ross linked to this today: www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/america-ti...
Thank you!
Trump on deploying the National Guard to Chicago: "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States."
"Push on Mortgage Fraud" @nytimes why do you suck so bad with these headlines? www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...
The full story of the assault on the Fed has to include Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee who has been manufacturing the allegations against Powell and Cook. If Cook does indeed sue, we may learn more about how he used his government position to target Trump critics via lawfare.
That article is gross: glorifying people who are participating in a vile regime. They're like Stephen Miller, really.
What is WRONG with people.
👉🏼 Rare Books Job Alert: Kelvin Smith Library at Case Western is hiring a director of rare books and university archives. 👈🏼 Pros: Cleveland rocks; our collections are fab, esp in history of print and science; you get to work with me 🥰 Cons: 🤷🏻♀️ employment.case.edu/psc/ERECRUIT...
"putting the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans at risk of being leaked or hacked, according to a whistle-blower complaint filed by the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u... 2/2
What a surprise: "Members of the Department of Government Efficiency uploaded a copy of a crucial Social Security database in June to a vulnerable cloud server....." 1/
A favorite singer of mine! That was. her last SFO appearance, in 2009.
DO NOT WEAR PERFUME TO LIVE IN PERSON PERFORMANCES.
North Korea is a desperately impoverished dictatorship. South Korea is a democracy with an enormous economy, thriving businesses, and an engaged citizenry. "Strain." COME ON. 3/3
What you meant: "In an Oval Office appearance with President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea, President Trump continued to undermine the decades-old alliance between their two nations by praising the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un." 2/
@nytimes.com Let me fix this for you: "President Trump, in an Oval Office appearance with President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea as the decades-old alliance between their two nations shows signs of strain, praised the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un." 1/
Here is the truth about museums: Museums are among the most trusted institutions in American society. Especially history museums. Museums support over 700,000 jobs in the US. Museums generate $50 billion in economic activity in the US every year. Just the facts. That’s what we do. #museum
It really is.
One of the great what-ifs of my life is how it would have gone if I had attended Chicago rather than Stony Brook for grad school in musicology. I was miserable at SB, have no way to know whether Chicago would have been better except that an urban campus would surely have been better than SB.
Just read this whole thread.
They didn't attempt a violent coup because of the left. They aren't destroying US science & academia because of the left. They're not embracing open racism & nazi ideology because of the left. They are adults, making choices, doing things of their own volition, and they bear the responsibility.
To put all this much shorter: the right's vaccine denialism is not the left's fault. They didn't arrive at that skepticism because of something the left did. They SAY that, of course, because they blame the left for everything, but liberals don't have to take them at their word! They lie a lot!
Liberal pundits should at least acknowledge the theoretical possibility that some dumb thing the right is doing is *not the left's fault*, not some mechanical response to something the left did, but a choice, made by adults who bear the responsibility for that choice.
I just cannot imagine Cuomo or Adams getting this many people, especially people 40 and under, on a beautiful summer Sunday afternoon to do a scavenger hunts accessible by public transit
we see very clearly in public polling that people in california and D.C. hate the deployments and that americans broadly disapprove of them, but here we have an assertion that the smart strategy is to avoid any discussion of the situation in favor of a pivot to, you guessed it, kitchen table issues.
An excellent point.
Folks can also protect themselves by donating to local rescues they're personally familiar with.
Can folks do me a favor? I was on Bluesky early & it was great. Mostly. I hit the eject button in January. I came back, many colleagues are here, but still don’t know I am. I co-created Halt and Catch Fire. I write TV & comics. Here’s two favorite set photos. Repost? I am in the wilderness.
www.nydailynews.com/2008/05/02/s...
I hope he has a wonderful time and that he has a good teacher and friendly classmates!
putting aside the trans rights issues specifically (lol), I think part of what has me so frustrated with the Newsom thing is that Pritzker, Walz, and Zohran are putting on clinics for a popular, progressive politics and we’re wasting time talking about this used car salesman ass goblin.
the actual communication problem democrats have is this: their most prominent national figures filter everything through focus grouped lines and are incapable of plain speech
Awwwww. A big milestone for a small person! Is your child excited? Happy? Apprehensive?
Trump is about to put me in jail for no reason. But I’m still proud that I wrote in Dwight Eisenhower instead of voting for Kamala Harris
Gov. Pritzker: "There is no emergency that warrants the President of the U.S. federalizing the Illinois National Guard." "Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families."
I agree -- getting into a discussion about "crime" is just lose-lose. I think the best way to frame this is about crushing local sovereignty, a continuation of Jim Crow efforts to ensure Black residents could not govern themselves as they saw fit.
Remembering today when pro-GOP media erupted with outrage over Kamala Harris' warning that Trump had plans to militarize the national guard and deploy them on the streets of US cities. Indeed, he had such plans. And now he's implementing them.
any halfway decent journalist should ask Newsom "why is 19 too young to receive lifesaving medical treatment but not too young to date you"
I was ready to retire for many reasons, and not wanting to deal with the expected impact of AI on technical writing is possibly the one I have cited most often since I escaped.
What an ordeal! So glad you arrived safely and that you and Lyndon are enjoying your walks. I love Paris, & have had memorable times there, including six weeks studying French when I was an undergrad & recent opera-focussed visits. I hope you, Ellen, and Lyndon have a wonderful time there!
Everyone needs to get comfortable calling this what this is: a military occupation of the nations capital by anti constitutional fascist ground forces.
I'm so glad that it's not from smoke.
I was afraid the color resulted from wildfire smoke. Northern California on September 13, 2020: www.flickr.com/photos/iront...